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the dark side of cobalt
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PlainName:

--- Quote from: Siwastaja on July 11, 2023, 02:25:27 pm ---
--- Quote from: PlainName on July 11, 2023, 02:16:04 pm ---
--- Quote ---And yet hydrogen fueling infrastructure is being rolled out further every year
--- End quote ---

Perhaps that's a mistake.

--- End quote ---
Maybe it can be called a mistake, but trying things out is something I can applaud, so I have nothing against it.

--- End quote ---

Sure, I am one for trying things even in the face of thunderf00ts rants, but there's a difference between having a go to see how it might work, and committing the entire country to it.
AVGresponding:

--- Quote from: tom66 on July 11, 2023, 08:32:41 am ---No, let's go there because this keeps getting brought up and it needs to be put down as a myth.  You don't have to be a zealot to be disappointed by people misrepresenting the situation.  Hydrogen is the new oil...? Okay... it's not an energy source so I'm not sure what you're going with there, you still need electricity or natural gas to make it.  It's a rather inefficient way to store energy, it has some interesting use cases where batteries can't compete on power/energy density but it's really not that interesting outside of those areas.  Seasonal energy storage is definitely an interesting use case - but use the electricity produced to charge cars!


--- Quote from: AVGresponding on July 11, 2023, 05:37:31 am ---Please demonstrate the maths for this claim. I work for a local authority as a sparks and I have some knowledge of the difficulties we're facing in our plan to change the fleet to full EV; our infrastructure alone will require a very large (>£100m) capital investment to be able to handle this, and that's for just a few hundred vehicles.

--- End quote ---

Average EV efficiency = ~3.5 miles per kWh (e.g. VW ID.3,  Hyundai Kona,  Tesla Model 3 size car)
Average UK driver = 6800 miles per year [1]
Average energy consumption per car per year = 9000 / 3.5 = ~2570kWh + 10% for charging losses so call it 2800kWh
Number of cars on UK roads = 33 million [2]
Total annual energy consumption for cars = 2800kWh * 33 million = 93.2 TWh
Annual UK electricity production = 333TWh [3]

Proportion is therefore 27.8%.  A little higher than I remembered, I quoted 15-20%, but let's call it within the margin of napkin math.  Average mileage has been falling precipitously over the last two decades so it may well end up closer to 20%.

As for the cost to your local authority, the cost of local infrastructure upgrades is not the same as overall generation capacity; there's no doubt that we'll need to increase capacity there e.g. for rapid chargers or businesses/LAs needing to charge their fleet every night.  But, that being said for passenger cars (which is my figure), a car doing 6,800 miles per year would need to charge for only about 4 hours per week.  With smart charging, and cars spending most of their time parked up somewhere, it's possible to distribute loads in areas where there are capacity constraints.  Look into Octopus Intelligent for an energy company experimenting with this at an early stage, dispatching cars as load for wind turbine overproduction for instance.

[1] https://www.nimblefins.co.uk/cheap-car-insurance/average-car-mileage-uk
[2] https://www.racfoundation.org/motoring-faqs/mobility#a1
[3] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1094628/DUKES_2022_Chapter_5.pdf

--- End quote ---

Your figures lack a certain consistency and your arithmetic is terrible but for arguments' sake I'll use the most favourable ones.

The fact that you come to the conclusion that we only need to add another 27% or so generating capacity is a serious underestimate; you're ignoring commercial vehicles completely, and the fleets owned by various aspects of government, metropolitan councils especially, will need to be changed to EV before domestic users. This is in part due to their own CAZ and ULEZ rules.

But you also completely missed my point; it isn't the generating capacity that's going to be the biggest problem, it's the distribution system.

To take my own metropolitan council as an example, the depot sites where we will need to run the bin lorries from do not have the electrical capacity to charge them. It's not just a matter of upgrading the boards either, they need new supplies from the substations, between 2 to 3 times the capacity of the existing ones. That is hugely expensive, and it's going to have to happen everywhere, because I guarantee no council/local authority in the UK currently has depots with the capacity to charge EV fleets. Hope you enjoy your 20% Council Tax levy which will be needed to pay for it.
nctnico:

--- Quote from: PlainName on July 11, 2023, 02:16:04 pm ---
--- Quote ---And yet hydrogen fueling infrastructure is being rolled out further every year
--- End quote ---

Perhaps that's a mistake.

--- End quote ---
It would be a rather costly mistake which -according to some- is super obvious to avoid... And yet they keep on going. Only hindsight will tell in the end.

In the 1980's is was utterly clear that not building extra nuclear power plants and keep on burning coal was the way forward. Nowadays we know better; burning coal has a hefty price tag in terms of environmental and health impact.
PlainName:

--- Quote ---In the 1980's is was utterly clear that not building extra nuclear power plants and keep on burning coal was the way forward.
--- End quote ---

It was? In the 80's power generation probably wasn't on my radar, but I can't recall ever seeing the suggestion that coal (or oil) was the way to go. It's always been seen as a finite resource, and any reference to that has typically been grudging acknowledgement that it hasn't run out yet.

Nuclear has had a bad press and been in and out of favour, but coal has never been its replacement. At least, over here - your country may have been different.
nctnico:

--- Quote from: PlainName on July 11, 2023, 05:27:32 pm ---
--- Quote ---In the 1980's is was utterly clear that not building extra nuclear power plants and keep on burning coal was the way forward.
--- End quote ---

It was? In the 80's power generation probably wasn't on my radar, but I can't recall ever seeing the suggestion that coal (or oil) was the way to go. It's always been seen as a finite resource, and any reference to that has typically been grudging acknowledgement that it hasn't run out yet.

Nuclear has had a bad press and been in and out of favour, but coal has never been its replacement. At least, over here - your country may have been different.

--- End quote ---
Well, in the 80's there was no real alternative for nuclear other than coal (also because coal is super cheap as well). Not choosing for nuclear means -silently- choosing for coal. And in the 80's and early 90's coal (and oil) being finite or even a problem where it comes to CO2 emissions wasn't on the radar much. Just a bunch of tree huggers that went on about climate change. It is only after 2000 that climate change started to get traction with some politicians. The rest was just relieved 'we' solved acid rain.
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